Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

He popped out of the streaming crowd into the quiet of the locker bank. This was where, simply by dint of being alone, he was most noticeable. He’d already removed three thousand dollars from the satchel and buckled it back up. He had the key to locker 217 in his right hand, the bag in his left. Inside 217 was $7,435, twelve pocket watches and thirteen wristwatches, two sterling silver money clips, a gold tie pin, and assorted women’s jewelry he’d never gotten around to selling because he’d suspected the fences were trying to fleece him. He took smooth strides to the locker, raised his right hand, which only trembled slightly, and opened it.

Behind him, someone called, “Hey!”

Joe kept his eyes straight ahead. The tremor in his hand turned into a spasm as he swung the locker door back.

“I said, ‘Hey!’ ”

Joe pushed the satchel into the locker, closed the door.

“Hey, you! Hey!”

Joe turned the key, locked the door, and pocketed the key.

“Hey!”

Joe turned, picturing the cop waiting for him, service revolver drawn, probably young, probably jumpy… .

A wino sat on the floor by a trash barrel. Bone thin, nothing to him but red eyes, red cheeks, and sinew. His jaw jutted in Joe’s direction.

“The fuck you looking at?” he asked.

The laugh left Joe’s mouth like a bark. He reached in his pocket, came back with a ten spot. He stooped and handed it to the old wino.

“Looking at you, Pops. Looking at you.”

The guy belched at that, but Joe was already moving away, lost in the crowd.

Outside, he walked east on St. James toward the two klieg lights crossing back and forth in the low clouds above the new hotel. It calmed him for a moment to imagine his money sitting safe and sound in the locker until he chose to return for it. A decision, he thought as he turned onto Essex Street, that was a bit unorthodox when a fella was planning a lifetime on the run.

If you’re leaving the country, why leave the money here?

So I can come back for it.

Why would you need to come back for it?

In case I don’t make it out tonight.

There’s your answer .

There’s no answer. What answer?

You didn’t want them to find the money on you .

Exactly.

Because you know you’re going to get caught.

He entered the Hotel Statler through the employee entrance. When a porter and then a dishwasher gave him curious glances, he lifted his hat and shot them confident smiles and two-finger salutes, a bon vivant avoiding the crowds out front, and they gave him nods and smiles in return.

Going through the kitchen, he could hear a piano, a peppy clarinet, and a steady bass coming from the lobby. He climbed a dark concrete staircase. He opened the door up top and came out by a marble staircase into a kingdom of light and smoke and music.

Joe had been in a few swank hotel lobbies in his time, but he’d never seen anything like this. The clarinetist and the cellist stood near brass entrance doors so unblemished the light bouncing off them turned the dust motes in the air gold. Corinthian columns rose from marble floors to wrought iron balconies. The molding was creamy alabaster, and every ten yards a heavy chandelier descended, the same pendant shape as the candelabras in their six-foot stands. Blood-dark couches perched on Oriental rugs. Two grand pianos, submerged in white flowers, sat on either side of the lobby. The pianists lightly tinkled the keys and carried on repartee with the crowd and each other.

In front of the center staircase, WBZ had placed three radiophones in their black stands. A large woman in a light blue dress stood by one of them, consulting with a man in a beige suit and yellow bow tie. The woman patted the buns of her hair repeatedly and sipped from a glass of pale, foggy liquid.

Most men in the crowd wore tuxedos or dinner jackets. There were a few in suits, so Joe wasn’t the only sore thumb in the gathering, but he was the only one still wearing a hat. He thought of removing it, but that would put the face on the front page of everyone’s evening edition in clear view. He glanced up at the mezzanine; there were plenty of hats up there because that’s where all the reporters and photographers mingled with the swells.

He dipped his chin and headed for the nearest staircase. It was slow going, the crowd pushing together, now that they’d seen the radiophones and the round woman in the blue dress. Even with his head down, he noticed Chappie Geygan and Boob Fowler talking with Red Ruffing. Joe, a Red Sox fanatic as long as he could remember, had to remind himself that it might not be a good idea for a wanted man to walk up to three baseball players and chat about their batting averages. He squeezed his way around the back of them, though, hoping he might hear a snippet to clear up the trade rumors about Geygan and Fowler, but all he heard was talk about the stock market, Geygan saying the only way to make real money was to buy on margin, any other way was for suckers who wanted to stay poor. That’s when the large woman in the light blue dress stepped up to the microphone and cleared her throat. The man beside her stepped to the other radiophone and raised an arm to the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure,” the man said, “WBZ Radio, Boston, 1030 on your dial, is here live from the Grand Lobby of the landmark Hotel Statler. I’m Edwin Mulver and it gives me great pleasure to present to you Mademoiselle Florence Ferrel, mezzo-soprano with the San Francisco Opera.”

Edwin Mulver stepped back, his chin tilted up, as Florence Ferrel patted the buns of her hair one more time and then exhaled into her radiophone. The exhalation turned, without warning, into a mountain peak of a high note that thrummed through the crowd and climbed three stories to the ceiling. It was a sound so extravagant and yet so authentic it filled Joe with an awful loneliness. She was bearing forth something from the gods, and as it moved from her body into his, Joe realized he would die someday. He knew it in a different way than he’d known it coming through the door. Coming through the door, it had been a distant possibility. Now, it was a callous fact, indifferent to his dismay. In the face of such clear evidence of the otherworldly, he knew, beyond argument, that he was mortal and insignificant and had been taking steps out of the world since the day he’d entered it.

As she ventured deeper into the aria, the notes grew ever higher, ever longer, and Joe pictured her voice as a dark ocean, beyond end, beyond depth. He looked around at the men in their tuxedos and the women in their glittering taffeta and silk sheaths and lace wreaths, at the champagne flowing from a fountain in the center of the lobby. He recognized a judge and Mayor Curley and Governor Fuller and another infielder for the Sox, Baby Doll Jacobson. By one of the pianos, he saw Constance Flagstead, a local stage star, flirting with Ira Bumtroth, a known numbers man. Some people were laughing, and others tried so hard to look respectable it was laughable. He saw stern men with muttonchop sideburns and wizened matrons with skirts the shape of church bells. He identified Brahmins and blue bloods and Daughters of the American Revolution. He noted bootleggers and bootlegger lawyers and even the tennis player Rory Johannsen, who’d made it to the quarterfinals at Wimbledon last year before being knocked out by the Frenchman Henri Cochet. He saw bespectacled intellectuals trying not to get caught looking at frivolous flappers with insipid conversational skills but sparkling eyes and dazzling legs… and all of them soon to vanish from the earth. Fifty years from now, someone could look at a photograph of this night and most of the people in the room would be dead, and the rest would be on their way.